MEN AND THEIR PROFESSIONS.
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��or make his arrangements to be with the angels at forty.
POLITICIANS AND SPORTING-MEN.
Both are professions — we guess— and both are to be given the ' cut direct ' by all men who have made up their minds that salvation, at the end of life, is desi- rable. Not that all will be ' lost,' but that the ' chances ' are nine out of ten in favor of it. The ' professor of politics ' needs no special notice in New Hamp- shire. He is an ever present individual, and what he don't know— unless he is mightily mistaken, and he never will ad- mit as much — no magazine writer can tell. The professor of the art of gamb- ling—for that is what constitutes a sport- ing man's career — may be briefly men- tioned. ' His ways are devious, dark and damning. He is the jackal of society that does more mischief than the church can counteract. He seeks the ruin of the body, the peace of mind and the soul of his victim, and, alas, too often accom- plishes his purpose. He prospers for a time, but the end is invariably terrible to contemplate. He is the abhorrence of all men— even those who are not particu- lar in morals— the culprit who gives the police the greatest uneasiness, the des- pised of the community, the forsaken of God, the hated and ignored of virtuous women. And more than all, this blear- eyed loafer, this would-be important gen- tleman, knows that he is under the ban of society, knows that he is a reprobate, a fugitive from justice, a worthless being who preys upon men and morals. Rum and its *t cce'etera ruins his health, and eventually— if he escapes prison, where he rightfully belongs— he dies, to be un- mourned and speedily forgotten, save by the victims who live to curse his memo- ry. This is a profession that no young man can contemplate with any degree of satisfaction, or seek to enter unless he has ' made up hi mind ' to be useless, and have it said, « it were better had he never been born.'
THE MERCHANT.
If there is any man in the States that is, and has been for several years past, deserving of sympathy, that man is the merchant, who has had his all— his ne-
��cessity of the present and his hope of old age— invested in l stock in trade.' The fall in prices on staple articles, rents, which are at ' war figures,' taxes, which have increased rather than dimin- ished, and customers who do not pay their bills promply, if at all, have made his life full of trouble and anxiety. In fact, in ninety cases in every hundred, his is a daily anxiety of which the pro- fessional man — who enjoys a long sum- mer vacation — knows absolutely nothing by experience. The merchant's nerves are at tension the greater part of the time, and the multiplicity of cares with which he is surrounded robs him of that enjoyment which, in the course of human events, all men who labor are entitled to receive. With notes becoming due, cur- rent expenses to meet — be the times nev- er so dull— he often finds himself in fine meshes, and enduring hardships of which the laboring man is entirely ignorant. There is, however, no necessity of minutely depicting the trials of the mer- chant, for the certainty that he is the man who, in these days of financial em- barrassment and uncertainty, l carries the heavy end of the plank,' is obvious to those to the ' manor born.' More- over, those who entertain the belief that the merchant is the man who is in the majority at fashionable summer resorts, who spends his money the most freely, will, upon investigation, find themselves deceived. We speak for the average merchants, for we know that while the public school teacher, the clergymen, lawyers and others, have opportunities of ' rest and refreshments ' to body and mind, while they may sun themselves at morn and eve and bask in cool seclusion at midday, the merchant and those other ' watchmen on the towers '—the physi- cian and journalist— are mired in busi- ness. Those, therefore, who envy the merchant, who imagine that he is the man who has the ' easiest time of it,' who see only the millionaire picture, are mistaken in their estimate. They should keep their eyes open to obituaries like the following, which we clip from a cur- rent number of a well-known newspa- per : ' He was for many years the sen-
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